My school, University of Central Florida, recently had an artical in the school newspaper where they talked about women in male dominated science fields. (somebody brought up something about intimidation above) One former female engineering student actually said that the reason she quit was because she felt intimidated by the fact that there were so many men around. I wonder why this doesn't happen in the college of education where the ration of men to women is 1 to 5?! I still havn't heard of a man being intimidated by too many women around. Anyways, I think that does an injustice to some of the women I know in engineering who are much smarter than the guys and put in a lot of work to earn the place they've gotten to. I seriously doubt there is any intimidation by having a lot of guys around and it's a cop out to blame quiting engineering on us men rather than themselves for not trying hard enough in this very challanging field.
From what I think, and what I did see on my former robotics team, is that there are just as many women in RATIO that put in the same amount of work in a project as a guy does. What I'm trying to say is, on a team with 50 guys and 10 girls about 25 guys do work and 5 girls do work. The same ratio 1/2 puts in work on the robot and the rest seem to be tag alongs. (just my personaly observation from my old team but I'm sure this can be disproven case by case). It just seems like the guys are doing more work on the team because obviously there are more of us to go around.
